"Spiritual Warfare" is commonly understood to be something external to ourselves. In practice, it is the "good fight" that Evangelicals wage against people who's beliefs and practices differ from their own by throwing mortars of Scriptural passages and bureaucratic restraints. In the Spiritual Warfare section of any given "Christian bookstore", one will find copious tracts on evolution, Mormonism, homosexuality and the so-called homosexual agenda, Catholicism, UFOs, aromatherapy and the New Age threat, Satanic Ritual Abuse, and Halloween. In fact, Tim LaHeye (author of the famous Left Behind series) has published a book that effectively singles out everything we value in modern democratic society as something to rally against... "Don the full armour of God," he tells us, "against all those stupid, evil things like science and equal, unalienable rights."

This understanding of Spiritual Warfare is dangerously off-base. Besides the ridiculousness of crying about UFOs and Satanic Ritual Abuse while there are legitmate concerns about the environment and social justice to worry about, this version of Spiritual Warfare has everyone pointed in one direction, allowing the Enemy to flank. While we are off screaming at everyone and everything else that we think is the problem, Satan has entered our hearts from the rear, corrupting our selves into something hateful and evil in itself. No Bible verse can protect us so long as we use them for evil purposes, and the Sword of the Word will only become a sword of words we use to cleave anyone we should be helping.

Spiritual Warfare, then, is the battle waged inside our own souls. It is the fight against our own selfish desire to...

sow hatred instead of love;

sow injury instead of pardon;

sow doubt instead of faith;

sow despair instead of hope;

sow darkness instead of light;

and sow sadness instead of joy.

When we do battle with real weapons against real people thinking we are doing God's work, putting out of the temple anything we do not understand, believing God to sanction all the we do, then we are at our gravest spiritual risk. You may claim to know all about why Catholics supposedly worship Mary or all the intricacies of the homosexual agenda, but do you know the state of your own soul that leads you to such ugliness?

When we rally beside Heaven's hosts, it is in reclamation of ourselves from darkness. Receptive to life-changing, redeeming grace, we allow God to hoist the flag of victory (that being the blood-stained cross of Calvary) on our own convicted humanity. True victory in Spiritual Warfare is not having made sure that Creationism is in the science class and all the little Jew and Muslim kids have to pray to Jesus. Its not making a martyr out of a gay man, scourging him and nailing him to a post in a field somewhere. Its not tisking kids on Halloween night and its not burning down Catholic churches.

Victory in Spiritual Warfare is following God and His will that She may: "grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love." Remembering always that "for it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life."

It is only when we are on the right side of that war, tasting that victory, can we feel qualified to help others wage that battle inside themselves. For our battle is not against others but for others, and it is not waged with weapons of metal or words, but with love. Wherever there are the poor in body and spirit, wherever there are the hungry for food or righteousness, wherever there are the doubting and the afraid and lonely and destroyed, indeed, there is where you will find true Spriritual Warfare in the hand that reaches down and the hug that comforts. To be real Spiritual Warriors is for the Lord to have made us into instruments of peace.